Blogging from the Server Side

About this Blog and its Author

I'm P.J. Hinton, the Director of Engineering (and wannabee wordsmith) at Compendium Blogware. I'm part of a talented and passionate team of software and system engineers who are working to develop a better business blogging platform.

I'm an old timer relative to the company's history, having started in early 2008 as Compendium's second full-time developer. Over that time I've worked primarily server side functionality, stuff you rarely see but surely miss when it isn't working properly.

Past projects have included a distributed system for editing and rendering XML blog page templates, an asynchronous system for notifying blog update services, a content idea recommendation engine that relies on RSS feed aggregation and caching, and countless RESTful web service endpoints that provide a reliable flow of data to our rich web interfaces.

As a startup employee, I get to wear multiple hats. Although most of my work is in PHP 5 and SQL, every once in a while I get a chance to write JavaScript for the user interface. Some of the things I have worked on include the keyword strength meter and the autosave manager in the editor. I was an active participant in the implementation of the new administrative content moderation interface we rolled out this spring. I've also become (for better or worse), the Engineering team's resident nomenclature guy, responsible for reviewing the names of object classes and web service endpoints.

Jumping into this role was nothing short of a major skill set retuning. Prior to coming on board with Compendium, I worked largely on cross-platform, native code applications in C and C++, spending two-years working at Rhysome, a northside Indy startup that was trying to break into the nascent Complex Event Processing software market. Before that, I spent a almost a decade at Wolfram Research, working on various parts of the wildly successful technical computing package Mathematica.

Compendium's leadership has succeeded in fostering a creative, energetic, and dynamic working atmosphere, something you'd be more likely to find in the Silicon Valley rather than the Circle City. What's not to love about that? :-)

I'm using this space to blog about subjects like:

the useful features of our blog hosting software
the value of corporate blogging in general
administrative issues in maintaining business blogs
the use of software to understand social networks
technologies relevant to our software development efforts

Sustainable SEO

Wednesday, October 7, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

Being prominent in search results has a high value. You're convinced of that and are willing to fork over the big bucks to get there. There is no shortage of consultants who will be all too ready to take your money with the promise of quick results. The question you should be asking the consultant is, "Are the results you offer sustainable?" If you don't ask, you could be setting yourself up for a let down in the long run.

What determines whether a tactic is sustainable? Look at it from the search engine algorithm designer's standpoint. Whether someone continues to use your service depends on whether you can consistently deliver relevant results to the visitor. If you can't, or some other search engine can do a better job, your value as a service diminishes greatly. You can join the pile of search has-beens like Alta Vista and Lycos.

Google pours tons of effort into refining their algorithms to distinguish between good content and attempts to game the system. Chances are, if you are using tactics to game, you're going to get caught and get whacked. That quick bump to the top all of the sudden becomes a rapid slide to the bottom, and even if you clean up your act, it's a very long climb from the basement.

A very good case-in-point can be found in P.J. Fusco's SEO Q&A column from today. She takes on the "build or buy" question for inbound links to your website. She writes:

In one instance, a former client decided to start aggressively buying text links. The business quickly shot up the rankings, but then dropped abruptly when Google caught on to what it was doing. The company abandoned the tactic and eventually returned to its regular positioning...after the better part of a year. In the short term, it had what could be called success on the three terms for which they were buying links. But over the long term, it's hard to call the tactic successful.

If this is where your tactics ultimately land you, then you're not practicing sustainable SEO. She goes on to write:

Imagine where your site could be positioned in the search engines if you took the link-buying budget and developed a widget that helped build links to your site year after year. Or suppose you took that money and invested in creating content that repeatedly added valuable links to your site? Blogs remain a relatively inexpensive way to not only create link-worthy content, but connect with your customers in an entirely different voice.

That's pretty much what Compendium is all about... providing an application that companies can use to do sustainable SEO through blogging.

I would encourage you to read her entire column. It also contains some interesting information on the adoption and usefulness of the canonical link tag, which is something we introduced on new blog templates about seven months ago.

Why are the Consumer Groups Concerned?

Thursday, September 3, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

Over the past couple of days, I've been blogging about a report issued by a group of well known privacy and consumer advocacy groups regarding behavioral targeting online. Today, I'd like to summarize what the groups say motivated them to publish the paper.

Starting with the concept of Fair Information Practices, a set of principles used by governments to regulate the privacy of individuals' information, the group argues that legislation needs to be updated to ensure that their application is relevant to the world of online data collection.

Two trends make this a necessity, the group argues. First, more people are doing a lot more things online, some of which involves very sensitive information. Second, the collection of data of where people go and what content they consume, is becoming more widespread. Much of this is done without the visitor's knowledge. This information is then used to serve up advertising that is targeted toward the visitors.

The groups note the following concerns:

The lack of disclosure about the data collection is invasive.
The type of targeting used in advertising could be predatory in the sense that explotivie deals could be served up to those most likely to buy into a misleading pitch.
Targeting could be discriminatory, with certain classes of consumers getting better offers than others based on things like race or income.
The data collected by one entity could be sold to another entity without consent of the person being tracked. Moreover, the information could be used for identity theft or even exploited by criminals or hostile parties.

Are the groups' concerns warranted? I think so. Despite the risk of reputation damage from shady business practices, some companies find the prospect of more effective ad campaigns too great of a temptation to resist.

Even if a company's upper management culture may discourage such it, time has shown again and again that a loose cannon will step outside the lines to get an edge on the competition.

The nice thing about a corporate blog is that it gives you a chance to be transparent with your customers and give them a chance to connect with you voluntarily.

Transparency comes with your posts because the content is the same regardless of the visitor. No one can accuse you of serving up one kind of information to a favored demographic.

Second, customers get to decide whether to form the relationship through comment submissions or call-to-action responses. A customer who comes to you is going to be a lot easier to sell to than one you're tracking down through everything short of an Orwell novel.

What Came out of that Consumer Advocate Meeting?

Wednesday, September 2, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

Yesterday, I wrote a post about the perils of being too zealous with the collection and use of customer data. I made passing mention about the efforts of several consumer and civil rights groups to spell out what sort of protections should be put in place.

A recently published followup story on CNet News.com gives a wrap-up of the group's findings. More importantly, the article provides a link to the policy document that articulates the basis for their stance. In the next few days, I'll be digging further into the policy document and commenting about some of key recommendations and what they could mean for marketers.

Is it Possible to Know too Much about Your Customer?

Tuesday, September 1, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

Suppose you're running a business that purveys a product or service. More often so than not, you're on a continuous quest to find new customers. Sure, the economists in the ivory tower will tell you all about the efficiency of markets in connecting supply with demand, but in real life, connecting with potential buyers is easier said than done.

It's becoming clearer that the mass marketing of decades past doesn't pay like it used to. Just look at the crumbling advertising revenue of newspapers and radio stations for cases-in-point. No one seemes to agree totally what is most likely to work in the future.

Up until the economic downturn a couple years ago, online advertising seemeed to be showing great promise. Pay-per-click (PPC) ad budgets swelled, with Google's fortunes rising with that tide. Things have pulled back some with the recession, and there is plenty of speculation on whether the boom can be restored with economic recovery.

The fiercely competitive world of online advertising is driving major players to develop better ways of targeting advertising to customers. Search engines and online advertising services alike rely on the collection of web surfers' browsing histories to infer what kinds of things these people may be interested in buying.

The practice of analyzing and targeting advertising, part statistics and part tea leaf reading, is referred to as behavioral targeting, and it's not without its critics. Indeed, eWeek is running a story on how a coalition of consumer and internet groups is holding a conference call on Sep. 1 to call the growing use of behavioral targeting into question.

As a business looking to get your message out to customers, this should give you good reason to pause. Sure, you can spend lots of money gathering or buying user data, and then throw another chunk of change making sense of the data, and then allocate another round of funds to execute on that analysis. Is all of this effort worth it if you wind up alienating your customers? Or worse yet, draw the wrong conclusions about them and recommend totally inappropriate things?

If this seems like much ado about nothing, try mapping the customer experience in the brick and mortar world. In most cases, customers like a human touch. Do the people at this store know what they're selling? Will they listen to me to figure out whether they can meet my needs? Do I like the people I'm going to be doing business with? You can probably picture what this dynamic is like when shopping at a business you are very loyal to.

Now suppose you're shopping at a different store and you notice that there's an employee following you everywhere you go. At first you may think he's suspicious of you stealing someting. You don't get the warm and fuzzies with such an adversarial stance.

Now suppose when you leave the store that employee shadows you everywhere you shop as well, always trying to stay out of view and scribbling notes at every chance. Now you're just annoyed and probably ready to confront the shadower.

How do you think you'd respond if the guy told you that not only would he not show you what information he had gathered but also said he was entitled to do so by virtue of the fact that you set foot in his store?

Can I get a show of hands on whether you would visit this store ever again? Yep, that's right, there's not many of you expressing your approval. The few of you who do probably have bought into the behavioral targeting belief system hook, line, and sinker. :-)

So what do you do? Instead of stalking your customers around the net, why not let the power of search bring customers directly to you? This is where blog marketing comes in.

Frequent posts, relevant to what you're doing, will elevate your visibility in search results.
When people show up on your blog and see ample examples of how you meet customers' needs, they're more likely to believe you know what you're talking about.
The comment forms give them a chance to be heard, so they know that you are willing to listen.
If you do a good job of demonstrating that there are real, and motivated, people on your team, they're more likely to like you as a company.

This isn't to say that you can't use analytics tools as people visit your blog. Indeed, we advocate accurate measurement as a means of learning what works with your customers. It's OK to note what messages convert. Just don't follow your customers out the door if they decide to bounce.

Worthwhile Read about Corporate Blogging Mistakes

Sunday, August 9, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

Over at Smashing Magazine, there is a post by Paul Boag that gets it (mostly) right about corporate blogging and why some businesses fail at it. Go over there and read it.

The place where I disagreed with Boag was on Truth (1), which I think veers off course by not taking into account that different businesses have different types of relationships with customers. You can read my dissent in Comment (22).

Some Helpful Advice on Text and Video Content Creation

Monday, August 3, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

While scanning my RSS feeds today, I stumbled across a couple of great links for content creators.

Perfectionism is the Enemy of "Done"

Over at Copyblogger, Michelle Russel provides five good reasons why you shouldn't let perfectionism overwhelm you into not finishing a post that you're not fully happy with. Because steady content creation is fundamental to the success of blog marketing, this should be required reading of all of Compendium's clients. In fact, Russel's post motivated me to write a post for my own somewhat neglected blog!

Vlogging Software Selection for Beginners

Including some video on a blog post can make for a compelling experience, but creating and editing video might prove to be a bit daunting to someone who doesn't work with the software on a day-to-day basis. Serdar Yegulalp has an article over at Information Week that takes a look at several video editing applications based on the availability of three features -- video capture, editing, and upload to hosting services. Weighing in at six pages, it's a substantial read, but a worthwhile one if you are considering an investment in this area.

Staying on Message in Real Time

Monday, July 13, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

Tech Crunch's Brian Solis has a detailed writeup and analysis of a panel discussion at CrunchUp on Real Time Business that was held last week, and it's worth a read if you're wondering what businesses have to do to succeed at real-time reputation management.

One of the key messages that emerged from the article is that monitoring and responding requires coordination across the company.

Social Media is, for the time being, tuning-in new channels of influence to incorporate into the brand and marketing mix. While it takes a station manager time to receive the signals and in turn, coordinate outward broadcasts, it is the divisions within each organization that will need to shift from an introspective support mode to an extrospective group of proactive collaborators.

But as Ross cautioned businesses and eager social media teams, “Before they collaborate with the community, they have to collaborate with themselves.”

If responsibilities and workflow isn’t established and most importantly, if guidelines aren’t drafted and disseminated company-wide, the intention of helping influential customers and advocates can quickly transcend into social, and very public, chaos.

We need rules of engagement.

Why is this important? The chaos that Solis describes comes from different portions of the company responding with inconsistent, if not contradictory, messages. Nothing undermines confidence in the public eye more than a business whose right hand doesn't know what its left hand is doing.

The content control aspect of Compendium Blogware can help your business stay on message when it comes to blogging because posts don't go live prior to administrator moderation.

The Demise of the URL a Long Time Coming

Wednesday, July 1, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

At CNET News' Technically Incorrect site, Chris Matyszczyk is blogging on the question of whether URLs matter anymore. He uses a recent conversation with someone regarding the choice of domain name to bring up an interesting point:

There was a time when people thought URLs were the key to getting hordes to throng your site. Make it short, have one of the most important keywords--sex, free, go, eat, my, and porn being examples--and your fortune was made.

People still try to trade the most simple URLs for hopeful hundreds of thousands. They will still line up in the hope of getting a vanity URL from Facebook.

But don't most people simply go to the little search box, type in the name of what they're looking for, and search?

If it's something they want to go back to, they'll bookmark it. But they won't remember what the URL is. For the simple reason that they don't need to. The Bingoogle fraternity does it for them.

This is something that has come up in previous posts on our blogs, most notably in one titled "The URL is dead...LONG LIVE SEARCH!" that was written by Chris Baggott over a year ago.

It's interesting to take a look back over the past decade to see how things have evolved. Back in the days when AOL still was the entry point for net access for a large chunk of people, businesses marketed themselves in commercials with phrases like "AOL keyword blah".

During the rise of the dot-com bubble, securing coveted domain names became a high priority, with astronomical sums being spent to acquire domain names based on frequently used nouns.

In the late 90s, a company called RealNames arrived on the scene, providing a more human friendly layer on top of the Domain Name System that's used in locating the servers for URLs. It got support for its technology included with Internet Explorer, and it scored some deals with some big name (at the time) search engines. Nonetheless, the company never gained mainstream credibility. In a 2001 critique of the service, Gartner analyst Whit Andrews wrote:

The RealNames problem is simple: DNS, despite its well-known weaknesses, is a technically workable--and reasonably comprehensible--method of naming Internet resources. The DNS method tends to falter when faced with the complexity and variety of consumers' interests--and with the fact that human language allows for terms that aren't specific enough to provide useful returns. Nonetheless, it remains entirely adequate for most Internet users' purposes--especially when combined with the many search engines and indexes that are available.

By 2002, the system had shut down. A paper written by Ben Edelman in 2002 presented quantitative analysis that argued Google was a much better locator of information than both DNS guesses and RealNames. The article also presaged the rise of paid search placement ads.

Organic search has become the way people figure out what's out there. It succeeded where RealNames failed because there is no sole gatekeeper of linkage between keyword and search result. Granted, Google is the 800 lb gorilla in this space, but there are alternatives.

But even within Google, the incentive is to return search results that will help its users find what they are looking for. It relies on its algorithms and tunes them to make sure that the job is being done right.

That means you don't have to write a check to Google to get the rank you want. Instead you invest your resources in creating an online presence that is relevant to your potential customers. A network of Compendium blogs is a good way to get there.

Not the Only One Curious About Yahoo's Advertising Push

Monday, June 8, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

Yesterday, CNet's Digital Media had a story about the drop in internet advertising reported for the first quarter of 2009.

The Interactive Adversiting Board, who published the report with PricewaterhouseCoopers late last week, was optimistic that things would return to an upward trend once the economy makes a turnaround.

The article concludes with author Jonathan Skillings noting Yahoo's bet on a move to online advertising, something I raised in a post last week as well:

Internet companies such as Yahoo are banking on businesses continuing to migrate to online advertising.

"Your brand is not defined by 20 keywords. You have to put a persona out there," Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said Wednesday at a luncheon with Wall Street analysts, talking about the potential allure of online display or video advertising to businesses used to buying ad time on television. But, she said, Internet ad sales forces need to get rid of some of the friction in their line of work that isn't there on the TV side.

This move might well be what ultimately makes or breaks Yahoo's recovery effort.

Does Google's Shift on rel/nofollow Matter for Blogging SEO?

Friday, June 5, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

Keven Newcomb has a detailed writeup at SearchEngineWatch about recent remarks made by Google's Matt Cutts that reveal that Google is treating the rel='nofollow' attribute on hyperlinks a bit differently than it has in the past.

Basically, using nofollow will still prevent PageRank from passing from the linking page through the nofollowed link. But that PageRank is no longer "saved" to be used by other links on the page. It just "evaporates," according to Cutts.

This counteracts a somewhat shady strategy of "Page Rank Sculpting" which had been employed by some sites to pump up the ranking of linked-to sites by selectively applying the rel='nofollow' attribute. The comments section on the article contained plenty of outrage, with at least one person suggesting that Google may be acting like an abusive monopoly.

To me this is just a tempest in the proverbial teapot. Google has tuned their algorithm so that the attribute serves its original purpose, to prevent spammers from abusing content submission points as a way of littering the net with links to their sites. It wasn't intended to be a system for gaming good karma in the search space.

As I mentioned in a prior post, our comment submission system automatically converts bare URLs into hyperlinks with the rel='nofollow' attribute. Because comments don't appear on a page until they have been approved by the blog's administrator, spammy links never get the chance to see the light of day.

It might be worth taking a look at a Rand Fishkin post referenced in Newcomb's article, too. He includes diagrams illustrating the change and provides a flowchart for deciding whether Link Sculpting should be considered.

The first question that you will see is "Do I have 1000s of pages not in Google's index?" If you are a Compendium customer, the answer should be "no" regardless of how long you have been using our software. Every time a post is approved for publication, our application sends out update notification pings to several services, including Google's blog search. Each individual post page contains back links to the main blog page as well as other blogs written by members of the organization. If it gets published, search engines will find it.

That means that you can spend your time bullet point #1 on the "no" branch of the flowchart: content development.

Do You Recall What was Revealed the Year the Media Died?

Thursday, June 4, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

Saw a link to a great song/video over at Valleywag that underscores my post about Yahoo from yesterday. If you've got 10 minutes to spare, spend it laughing at "Mad Ave Blues".

The Certainties of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison

Thursday, June 4, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

When I read a CNet story from yesterday about Oracle CEO Larry Ellison touting Java-based netbooks, I recalled trade press stories from the mid 90s when Ellison was promoting the notion of a low priced network computer, which sounded vaguely similar. It's as if he's never given up on that grand vision of the thin, thin, thin client.

Back then, internet access was largely available only to corporations, the military, academic institutions, and a few plucky dial-up customers. Java was a new kid on the block, and Netscape was the browser company.

As I searched for instances of articles from that era that still might be floating on the web, I happened upon a more recent story over at The Register, which lambastes the idea much more eloquently than I ever could. Hop on over and take a read. You know it's going to be good when there is a reference to "partying like it's 1995" in the headline.

Is Yahoo Hitching its Wagon to a Dying Star?

Wednesday, June 3, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

The continued restructuring over at Yahoo makes for interesting reading. CEO Carol Bartz has generated a lot of buzz by shaking things up at the long adrift internet giant and offering up some blunt, if not salty, language along the way.

Over at CNet, there is a good summary of Bartz's latest remarks, which were made to financial analysts today. One segment grabbed my attention and made me wonder whether Yahoo may be making a bad strategic move.

"An extroverted engineer looks at your shoes when they are talking to you." Bartz got her biggest laugh of the day with an old joke about engineers, and how she prefers spending time out making sales calls with Yahoo's sales force. This is a key area of differentiation for Yahoo: it says it wants to focus on "high-touch" sales, rather than the algorithmic model that prints money for Google.

The hope is that Yahoo can translate its strength in display advertising to lure revenue from chief marketing officers at big companies thinking about moving a chunk of their advertising spending from television to the Web. For those folks, "your brand is not defined by 20 keywords. You have to put a persona out there," she said, referring to the need for display and/or video advertising. In order to do win that business, however, Yahoo has to take a lot of "friction" out of the Internet ad sales process that just isn't there in the television business.

From this I read that Yahoo is betting on growth in online advertising, thinking that there is turf to be won from television. The only way that I could see this making sense is if you buy into the argument that the pie for interruption-based advertising will continue to remain big. All you need to do is figure out how to convince CMOs that their future customers' eyeballs will be tuned in to Yahoo properties rather than the TV. The "20 keywords" slam goes on to suggest that getting found in search results is less important than the presence you project with your ads.

Our CEO, Chris Baggott, has blogged about this before and has noted the declining importance of display ads versus search marketing.

We talk a lot about the failure of advertising here in this blog, 2009 is bringing a huge body of evidence that supports what we all knew to be true: You can't interrupt your way to marketing success...you can only engage your way to success.

Time will tell whether Bartz's vision of increased ad revenue prove true. I'm not a gambling person by nature, but I don't think I'd put money on it.

Why You Should Welcome Negative Comments

Tuesday, June 2, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

A common concern raised by businesses evaluating Compendium Blogware as their blogging platform is what should be done about negative user comments. Some go so far as to wanting the ability to omit a comment section altogether.

Jeff Atwood, a well known software developer who also publishes a blog titled Coding Horror, has a great post about why bloggers should welcome comments, both good and bad. Pulling out a key excerpt:

Criticism, painful though it may be, is still a conversation. It means your readers and listeners are engaging with you, and there's something to learn from following that conversation. Those messages you're broadcasting out into the world are being received, in some form, by someone on the planet.

He goes on to note that you should start worrying when people stop caring to comment at all. When the interest is gone.... when you are no longer relevant to your market... do you think your business will have much of a future?

Read Atwood's post.

Why Brad Brenner is Wrong about Others being Wrong about PR

Monday, June 1, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

Brad Brenner has a blog post claiming that public relations professionals are all the more relevant in this day and age. Quoting from the text of the article:

Doomsayers don’t get it. They think PR is all about writing a press release or getting a story in a magazine. Now that print media is in decline, they say PR is on it’s way out as well. They never understood that press releases and published articles are just means to an end. The core of PR has always been about communication skills and strategies - the ability to evaluate the competitive landscape, identify the right messages and succinctly and effectively communicate those messages to the right audience -wherever they may be.

Brenner's claim is that the scope of PR's function transcends traditional press release pitching and because of this, PR takes on a strategic role:

The fact is, marketing today is more complicated and more multi-faceted than ever before. Creating, managing and maximizing the success of a marketing program in the digital age requires a real pro - and today, more than ever, that pro is a public relations expert.

What Brenner fails to address in his rebuttal is that power of public relations professionals to shape the message is shrinking. Brenner would like you to think that PR professionals are uniquely qualified to compose and convey that message. An inconvenient reality that I have mentioned in a prior post puts that assumption to question:

... your reputation is controlled by a marketplace where your message competes with that of those who don't agree with your message.

There are too many PR professionals who think that some creatively spun copy will tidy up and protect a brand that is self-destructing because of product or service issues. It doesn't work that way anymore.

Carl Morris has a great post on his blog from this past January that chronicles how badly PR people screwed things up for Chrysler and Target. And let's not forget the feud between TechCruch and Lois Whitman.

Consumer sentiment toward corporate America ranges from skeptical to cynical. Quoting an excerpt from an April 28 story from Reuters about a Harris poll:

"What was surprising in this year's study was the very clear total loss of trust in corporate America," said Robert Fronk, senior vice president at Harris. "The focus on individual rewards, the focus on greed all really added up to this incredible drop."

Respondents said the brutal recession has darkened their view of corporate America, with 75 percent reporting their opinion of corporations was lower due to the downturn. They saw little hope for economic improvement, with 43 percent expecting conditions to get worse over the next six to 12 months.

Good PR professionals who understand how the playing field has changed can help a client from making gaffes, but they can no longer repair the damage that bad behavior leaves behind.

The companies that will succeed in the future are those who straighten up and act in a way such that their operations align with the ideals they set forth in their literature. Letting the employees, rather than paid professionals, write the posts will go a long way towards meeting that goal.

Keeping the Comment Section Clean

Saturday, May 30, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

Tonight, New York Times economics editor Catherine Rampell had a great blog post pointing to a comic that depicted what an academic journal might look like if it had a comments section, a la a news site or a blog. If you have ever had the joy of reading academic research papers and spam laden comment sections on websites, then you'll probably laugh as much as I did.

Granted, our software might not be able to completely stop comment spammers from trying to put off topic or inappropriate comments on your blog, but because our application gives you final say of whether the submitted comment goes live, the inappropriate content never sees the light of day.

Moreover, we automatically attach rel nofollow attributes to hyperlinks so that others sites don't feed off of your page rank.

Not Enjoying the Silence

Friday, May 29, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

Words are very unnecessary
They can only do harm

-- Depeche Mode, "Enjoy the Silence", Violator

My blog has been quiet the past couple of months, and that's not exactly something I'm happy about. Even here, at the forefront of corporate blogging software development, we sometimes fall into that "too busy to blog" rut.

Unlike the lyrics quoted above, words are very necessary when you're looking to acquire new customers. If you're not getting the word out about what your business has to offer, new customers won't be a callin'.

Fortunately, since everyone in our organization has a blogging account, the effort of keeping the message current and compelling is spread out across all departments. When they arrive at our website from a search, our prospective customers get to hear from a diverse array of voices... sales, marketing, client success, product support, and even the development team. That means our blogs continue to feature fresh content.

So what has been keeping me away from the post editor? Only one of the biggest development projects our department as undertaken since the new template editing and rendering environment we rolled out a little over a year ago.

Back in late March, the engineering team turned its attention to the user interface that administrators have for moderating blog posts and comments. There were two ways to moderate content. One interface presented content that was pending approval, while another provided a more comprehensive listing of all content on the network. We wound up replacing these with a sleek unified interface.

The change was a nontrivial undertaking. Over the past year, we have migrated to a service-oriented approach for our application, meaning that the operations one could perform with our application were accessible from URLs, callable by way of modern JavaScript interfaces or even other web services.

The moderation of posts and comments was one of the few remaining areas where we didn't have web service coverage. So we wound up having to write brand new service endpoints to do this, and we upgraded a number of our existing endpoints for listing and retrieving content so that they would be useful for a moderation interface.

On the front end, we took a different approach to designing a user interface. We created new JavaScript classes dedicated to interacting with web service endpoints, and we developed a set of loosely coupled components that communicated changes in state asynchronously.

How did this benefit the end user? Moderation moved to one central location instead of two. The interface took on a much more familiar appearance, bearing resemblance to popular web-based e-mail applications which have listing and preview panes. The interface was designed using state-of-the-art rich front end technologies.

Listings of content are now obtained more quickly, and there's no more waiting for the page to refresh itself as more information is retrieved. The act of previewing got a huge upgrade, with more detailed information about the post and a means of previewing content as it would appear on the live blog.

All in all, it was quite an achievement from a small, talented, and cohesive team. The Compendium Engineering team is committed to continuously improving the product in ways that make the experience of corporate blogging easy and enjoyable. You can be assured that we don't like resting on our laurels. :-)

A Doorway Page by any Other Name?

Sunday, May 3, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

I read an article over at Search Engine Land, written by Michael Gray, that makes the case for using contests to boost organic search results. I found portions of the post to be of dubious merit.

Gray argues that the contest prize should inclue the keywords that you are trying to target.. People get word of the giveaway, they link to your contest landing page, and then you get a result boost for your target keywords.

This isn't a bad idea. However, I do believe that he goes off the deep end when he offers up advice for handling the page after the contest is over. Quoting from the text of the article (emphasis mine):

Another mistake a lot of people make is that after the contest ends they leave the page up with a notice the contest is over, or 301 the content to another page. A better solution is to leave the existing URL in place and just improve the page with different content. If you are concerned about usability, you can relocate the contest information to a new URL with a link at the bottom or even display a message based on incoming referral URL’s or referral keywords.

The portions I've italicized just happen to share the characteristics of a "doorway page", which is a big no-no in the world of legitimate SEO. Such pages are not an integral part of the website and serve as a sort of bait-and-switch to the visitor, forcing them to click on another link to get to the website.

There is no shortage of SEO advice on the web, but the web can be a misleading place. Any advice should be viewed with a critcal eye and weighed against current best practices.

Browser Entrenchment Redux

Friday, May 1, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

The ZDNet blog Between the Lines had a great post yesterday about businesses clinging overwhelmingly to Internet Explorer... and not just IE, but the aged and clunky version 6. The reason corporate IT departments resist upgrades, according to the post:

Companies are worried about custom apps that may fail on new browsers and security and compliance. In addition, companies limit the ability to upgrade. Seventy percent of companies restrict browser choice and Web content. Forrester notes that “IT control trumps technology populism.”

There were several comments from IT people that echoed this sentiment strongly.

I wrote about my feelings on this five months ago, and I feel just as strongly today. In my opinion, there is something culturally sclerotic about an organization that is so resistant to change. Increasingly, the ability to process and understand current information streams is becoming a competitive necessity.

The current crop, and future generations, of web applications enable the effective organization, analysis, and interpretation of information at an accelerated rate. If your organization uses these apps well, it stands to reason that your company will have a leg up on the competition.

Much of the complaints about browser upgrades and switches come down to the following whines:

The employees at my business will encounter too much difficulty in adapting to the interface changes.
The vendors who develop the web apps we use haven't updated their product to handle a browser later than IE 6.

At the risk of painting too broad of a brush, I think this is an indication of three potential problems with such companies:

Their human resources department has a poor recruiting process that doesn't demand a better grade of potential employee, one that is better suited to adaptation.
The IT department is awful about messaging product roll outs.
Their information technology selection process is defective, adopting product vendors whose improvement cycle is glacially slow. Think about it, IE 7 went live in October 2006, which is over two and a half years go.

The post's author, Larry Dignan, puts it rather well.

The problem: Information workers live in browsers all day. And companies are giving them the equivalent of a Yugo.

Being compared to 1980s state-of-the-art Serbo-Croatian engineering is a wake up call for sluggish business in difficult economic times.